Ray smiled like a cat with a mouthful of warm mouse. “Why there’s one famous-as-hell country singer, and I ain’t going to tell you who he is, who can’t even read. Literally can’t sign his own goddamn name.”
“But how do these people survive?” I protested. “It’s got to be a cutthroat business. Record deals have got to be complicated. How do they protect themselves?”
“Most of them can’t,” Ray said. “That’s why it’s so important to have a manager you can trust. And a booking agent who’s working for you and not against you. It’s real difficult, too, ’cause a lot of these yahoo hillbillies come up here and get lucky enough to cut one or two hit records, and all of a sudden theirs don’t stink anymore.”
“Get the big head, huh?” I realized we were getting sidetracked, but on the other hand, if I was going to jump into this cesspool, it sure would be nice to know where the rocks were.
“They can get to be real assholes, some of them. And the ones who come across nicest on the interview shows and at Fan Fair and stuff like that are usually the biggest assholes of all.”
“Was Rebecca one of them? Did she have the big head?”
Ray hesitated, unsure, I thought, of what he really wanted to say. “A woman with Rebecca Gibson’s talent was entitled to be a prima donna,” he said. “You don’t realize the pressure that’s on these people. Of course, you’re going to be difficult when you go through what these people go through. Especially when it takes as long as it did for Rebecca.”
“Did it take a long time for her to get a break?”
“Rebecca Gibson worked her butt off for over ten years before she started to make even a little bit of money. Anybody who works in this business long enough gets hard, Harry. You got to be. Nice guys get served up on a plate. So you’ve got the natural, understandable artist’s temperament combined with a residue of vinegar left over from the struggle and all the times she got screwed. The two albums she did early on that cratered. All the broken promises, the rip-offs. Hell, the heartbreak.”
“So she was difficult?”
Ray sighed. “Man, you hit her on the wrong day, she’d rip your face off and stuff it down your throat before you could get your jaw shut back.”
“Funny,” I said, “she seemed just sort of flaky on the stage. Cute and flighty.”
Ray snorted. “That’s the act, man.”
“Woman like that must have made a lot of enemies. Tell me about this Faye Morgan.”
“Faye Morgan,” he said. “Best booking agent in the business. One of the few booking agents with a reputation for being straight with artists and promoters both.
Usually an agent will lean toward lying to one more than the other. But not Faye. She lies equally to both.”
“I thought you said she was straight.”
“In this business, if you lie to everybody equally, you are straight.”
Christ, I thought. What am I getting myself into?
“Great, so how are they connected?”
“Faye and Mac worked out a deal about six months ago, giving Faye exclusive rights to schedule and arrange dates for Rebecca. See, Rebecca’s got an album in the can. Supposed to be out next month. Everybody figures it’s going to be her breakout album. Coming out on Sanctuary Records.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Hottest independent company in the business,” he said.
“Why an independent? Why not one of the big companies?”
“Sanctuary’s independent, but they’re distributed by Warner,” he explained. “They’ve thrown a lot of money behind this album. It’s all contracts, man. Numbers and contracts.”
“Which can be forged, torn up, changed …”
“At the drop of a hat,” he said.
“So the hottest booking agent, the hottest manager, and the hottest independent record company were all getting behind Rebecca Gibson.”
“You got it, big guy. Rebecca Gibson was going to be fire in the sky.”
“Only now she’s the coldest thing going—a corpse in a casket.”
Ray gritted his teeth and forced a smile in my direction. “Harry, you got a weird sense of humor.”
Ray continued on for another hour with his insider’s account of the music biz. Funny, I’d gone through my phase of wanting to be a musician. The attention, the glamour, the babes. Great fantasy, only in my case I spent most of my daydreaming playing air clarinet to Benny Goodman records rather than air guitar to Dire Straits. I liked the stuff I heard back in the Sixties, but my father had a collection of old jazz 78s that really stole my heart. I’ll take the Quartet’s Palomar Ballroom recording of “Vibraphone Blues” over “Sympathy for the Devil” any day. Charlie Watts hasn’t got a thing on Gene Krupa.
Fortunately for the music world, I gave up that fantasy early. And the more I learned about the music business, the more I realized how fortunate it was for me as well.
I sat down in my office, alone now, and reviewed my notes. Where should I start? There were so many people who might have wanted to take a shot at her. Jealousies, rivalries, old simmering hatreds that erupt in passion and violence and blood. Treacheries and betrayals, lies and counterlies and counter-counterlies.
I shook my head, trying to stay focused. Too much to think about lately, all this chaos. Maybe I should run downstairs and get the late edition of the afternoon paper, check up on the day’s developments.
I threw my coat on, but the phone rang just as I was headed for the door. I reached for it instinctively, quickly, then stopped with my hand just above the handset. I fingered the tape in my pocket, the one where somebody had told me to enjoy these last few days of mine. What if …?
To hell with it. If it’s the same caller again, damn him, let him hear my voice. He can’t hide behind an answering machine forever, and neither can I.
I picked up the phone. “Denton Agency,” I said, coldly, professionally, partially holding my breath.
“I need a private dick.”
I spewed out a breath and giggled like a teenager. “Well, honey, you’ve come to the right place.”
“Good,” Marsha said. “I’m beginning to miss you a lot.”
“Just beginning?”
“Okay, already missing you a lot.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s any great comfort, the hormone levels are climbing into the stratosphere on this end, too. How are you? How long can you talk?”
“I’m fine. Who knows how long this blasted phone will hold out. They allowed food and supplies through today. We got Sterno, soap, batteries, and flashlights. But you know what they sent us to eat?”
“What?”
“MREs.”
“MR whats?”
“Meals Ready to Eat. Government supplies. Can you believe that?”
“Oh, no. You mean that freeze-dried shit?”
“Apt description,” she said, then sighed. “Oh, they’re not inedible. Filling, reasonably nutritious. But tasteless.”
“When you’re a free woman, we’ll hit the best restaurant in a four-state area. My treat.”
“Something with spices and sauces and bottles of wine, right?”
“You got it.”
“I think I’m becoming sensorially deprived,” she said. “All I’ve thought about for the last day and a half is food and sex. Not necessarily in that order. What have you been up to today?”
“We went to court for Slim’s preliminary hearing.”
“How bad is it?”
“As much as I hate to admit it, he could’ve killed her.”
“You think he did?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“You sound pretty preoccupied with it.”
“I was,” I answered, “until you called. Now my preoccupations have changed. How’s Kay holding up?”
Marsha’s voice lowered. “Frankly, she’s becoming insufferable. For the first day or so, she was as terrified as a cornered rabbit. But now she’s convinced we’re safe in here and she’s yack
ing away at ninety miles a minute all the time. And I can’t get away from her. The politics in here are weird, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there are five of us in here. Me, Kay, and three morgue attendants.”
“Let me guess: the three morgue attendants are all male.”
“And all under about twenty-five.”
“You don’t have to say it. I got the picture.”
Five people trapped together in tight quarters: two women, one in charge, and three young males. Yes, I thought, the dynamics could get a little touchy.
“So we’re all doing our level best, but frankly, it’s getting tough. I’m afraid we’ll kill each other before the wackos can get to us.”
I rubbed my forehead and fought the cramp that had erupted in the crook of my neck from having the phone jammed in there.
“Jeez, Marsh, I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just hang in there. We’ll be all right.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re being held hostage and you’re cheering me up. What’s wrong with this picture?”
Her laugh was broken by the popping of the phone and about two seconds of static. When she spoke again, her voice was filtered through a layer of hiss. “—got to go. We’ve had to start rationing phone calls. We had a problem with a couple of the guys making long-distance calls, and we can’t seem to get Kay to limit her calls to less than a decade. I’ll—”
Another loud pop, then silence, and finally dial tone. I placed the phone back on its handset, then turned and looked out my window in the other direction, toward the east, where Marsha was. Where I couldn’t see her or feel her anymore, at least not in reality. But that’s okay. Reality sucks anyway.
The afternoon traffic on Gallatin Road slowed first to a crawl, then to a dead stop. I looked down at my watch; too early for rush hour. What the hell was going on? I wondered. To my right, a guy on crutches passed us on the sidewalk.
We sat there for a while, then the traffic started moving again. As I approached a slight rise in the pavement and topped it, I realized what the holdup was. A tall, black-skirted, white-shirted woman with a badge and a feeble bleach job held up a stop sign about the size of a Ping-Pong paddle and guided another gaggle of rug rats across the intersection.
Okay, so I know I’ve got this thing about traffic, but I try not to get too iced about school zones. After all, we have to protect the flower of American youth, even the ones that carry nickel-plated .22s in their lunch boxes next to their bologna-and-cheese sandwiches. So I usually stick pretty close to the fifteen-mile-per-hour limit and smile at the crossing guards and behave myself. For some reason, though, it was making my skin crawl today.
Everything was making my skin crawl today.
I’d decided that since I could no longer stay focused on any one subject and was as restless as a six-year-old with ten more minutes left in time-out, I’d take advantage of my options as a self-employed person and blow off the rest of the day. I don’t do that often. It’s not so much that I’m self-disciplined; I’d just rather be doing something than not doing something. Most days, that is.
So I drove over to Marsha’s apartment, where I watered plants and checked locks. Then I dug around in her desk until I found what looked like a mailbox key. I walked back down the corridor and opened her box to find several days’ worth of mail stuffed in.
There was a stack of the usual bills and junk mail, and a couple of catalogs: L. L. Bean, Williams-Sonoma, and some adventure-wilderness catalog with a photo of a pair of well-sculpted rock climbers in their early twenties plastered across the front. The two were dangling off the side of a cliff, pausing in midrappel for a swig from some plastic bottle no doubt full of yuppie mineral water. Marsha loved this kind of stuff: hiking, rappelling, rock climbing—all the adventure fantasies that appeal to people with too much education, too much time spent in windowless offices, and usually, too much money. Marsha had even coerced me into springing for a two-hundred-dollar pair of hiking boots that I’d never used. We were both too busy, something that left me relieved and thankful. I’d never mentioned to her that the prospect of leaping off the side of a cliff with nothing but a designer rope between me and the consequences of violating the laws of physics made me very nervous. Like totally incontinent …
Besides, I have no great love for the outdoors. My idea of roughing it is when room service closes at ten.
I moped around for a while, then headed across the river. Once through the school zones, the traffic picked up and I soon found myself in the left-hand-turn lane near the old Inglewood Theatre, hoping for a break in the traffic. The light at Ben Allen Road changed over and I shot across two lanes while there was still time. Around the corner, past the steel-doored Death Rangers clubhouse, the chain-link gate across the entrance to Lonnie’s junkyard—excuse me, auto-salvage and recycling lot—was shut tight. I pulled the smoking Mazda to a stop and set the parking brake.
The padlock on the gate was unhitched, so I figured he had to be there. Without thinking, I pulled the latch up on the gate and swung it wide. The hinges let loose with a long, high-pitched screeching sound.
Big mistake.
She registered in my peripheral vision as I stepped through the gate and started to close it behind me. It was a natural reaction, I guess; I hadn’t seen her in days, didn’t know she was back from the vet’s. I smiled, started to say something in the usual baby talk she drove me to, then froze.
Shadow, Lonnie’s aging timber shepherd was charging me from across the yard. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been bad. Except for the silence. No barking. No eager panting. No twitching back and forth of the long black-and-gray tail. She was low, close to the ground, coming straight at me like a runaway locomotive, except that she was in complete control. I could yell her name, but that’s about all I’d have time to yell before she ripped my throat out.
I whipped around and threw all my weight into the gate, pushing it back wide-open again from where I’d nearly shut it. Thinking, lately, had been like trying to see through a fogged-up windshield. But I had sense enough to realize my only hope was to get that chain-link gate between me and her.
I caught a glimpse of her as I ducked behind the gate just as she became airborne. She was eye level with me by the time I got my head turned. I had my fingers intertwined in the chain link, scrambling like hell as I pulled it to, hoping she didn’t have a taste for finger food. Shadow had to weigh seventy, maybe eighty pounds, and on her best days, she could outrun a Corvette from a dead stop for twenty yards.
She slammed into the chain link so hard that the fence shook. I felt her hot breath. Slobber splattered on me as I pulled the fence to and got it latched just in time to get my fingers out of the way.
She dropped to the ground after hitting the fence, but only for a moment. Then she was up on her hind legs, this time with a low guttural growl coming from somewhere deep inside of her that scared the slam-dunking hell out of me.
Behind her, the door to the rusty green trailer opened and Lonnie dashed out, zipping up a pair of tight Levi’s.
“Shadow, cut!” he yelled. She jumped down, backed off two feet, and sat on her haunches. She was heaving like a marathoner at the Mile-24 marker, but she never took those black eyes off me for a second.
“You dumb son of a bitch,” Lonnie hissed as he came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You trying to get yourself killed?”
My heart pounded in my chest and an enormous pool had formed under each armpit. “I didn’t know she was back,” I wheezed. Lonnie squatted down and buried his face in the fur behind her ear, nuzzling her, whispering to calm her. “You didn’t tell me.”
He turned to me. “You didn’t ask.”
“She was so quiet,” I said, forcing my breath to slow to normal.
“You think she’s going to warn you?”
I suddenly felt dizzy, clammy all over. “If I hadn’t see her coming …”
“Don’t dwell on it,” he said. “C’mon in now. And for God’s sake, try to act like a sane person.”
I looked at her. Her eyes still had not warmed. Two rounded cubes of black ice stared out at me from gray-and-black fur. “You sure it’s okay?”
“It will be. C’mon.”
I unlatched that gate again. She seemed to stiffen for a second. Lonnie pressed his hand into her fur. I stepped through the gate, never taking my eyes off her. I’d gotten into nasty scrapes before, but never had I experienced anything like this. I never considered Shadow this way, as a killing machine that could be turned in my direction.
I closed the gate behind me. “I’m sorry, man. I guess I just wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s not all your fault. She don’t see so well anymore. Come closer and hold out your hand, slow. Don’t make a fist.”
“Shadow,” I cooed. “It’s me, baby. Harry.”
The low growl from hell started up again. Lonnie rubbed her ears. My hand got within about two inches of her great black, shiny wet nose. I moved it closer, just a hair, then held it there.
She seemed to pause for a second, then sniffed the air expectantly. Behind Lonnie, I saw her tail wag. My heart backfired in my chest as she lunged, and I had this fragmented thought that this was what the jaws of death were going to look like.
Then her paws were on my shoulders, and her huge tongue was slapping across my face, wet and hot and sloppy. I relaxed and wrapped my arms around her in a bear hug. I lowered her to the ground, and she barked twice, loud and cheery. No big deal to her. All forgiven, all forgotten.
“No, baby, no chicken. I don’t have any chicken today.”
She barked a couple more times, like I could still eat you, bud.
Way Past Dead Page 13